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It doesn't matter what you believe; all that matters is why you believe it, and how accurate you can show your beliefs to be.
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I know of people living in this country right now who think that white people came from Adam and Eve, and that there are all these other races that are separate creations and that aren't related at all. And I know from prior research that many different religious groups have believed this sort of thing for thousands of years, but the idea that any seemingly educated official would believe that during my lifetime is rather disturbing.
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I like Godzilla as much as the next guy. No, I like Godzilla more than the next guy! Since I was a little kid, I watched all those absurd rubber-suit movies thinking how cool it would be if we remade Gojira as a big budget block-buster. They failed to do that in 1985, when they brought back Raymond Burr. They failed to do that in 1998, with Tristar's GINO (Godzilla In Name Only) and I'm sorry to say that they failed again with the latest attempt.
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I wasn't really a fan of kaiju, (giant Japanese monsters) only Godzilla himself. He was my hero as a boy, and even now his roar has been my only ring tone any of the cell phones I have ever had.
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Religion doesn't solve the problem of rape at all; it exacerbates it. It should be (and in some atheist societies, it is this way) that women could walk about scantily-clad or even nude, and that men would have respect or sanity enough not to be violent against them on such paltry excuses as a lack of human decency or self control. I mean, you don't bludgeon children to death when someone's kid is crying loudly and annoying you, right? So why would you victimize a woman just because you find her attractive? That's sick, but that is the attitude that is typically perpetuated by religion.
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Convicted fraud and pseudoscience charlatan, Mister Kent Hovind argues that what has already been directly-observed and shown to be certainly true is (in his opinion) impossible, and the only option he thinks is possible is that an imperceptible (and possibly imaginary) mystical being poofed everything out of nothing by magic. The irony is that what he proposes is physically impossible because it defies all natural laws, and it's logically implausible since it has neither precedent nor parallel anywhere in reality to imply that it could still be true anyway. Where is there evidence anywhere that such a thing actually exists, or that anything even could have any of these abilities?
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Every religion boasts their own miracles and prophecies proving theirs is the truest faith. So its no surprise that Christians say the same things about their versions of God too. No religion is significantly different from any other in this respect. But whatever else may be going on, when men claim revelation from God, it usually means is that they've decided to promote their own biased and unsubstantiated opinions as if they were divinely inspired.
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The story of the Ten Commandments is clearly based on the earlier story of the law code of Hammurabi, which was a better list and actually existed in real history centuries before the legends now attributed to Moses. Since then, people have come up with better documents like the Magna Carta and the U. S. Constitution. These are better, largely because they stand against what [the] Commandments represent; giving power to the people instead of indomitable despots.
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The supposedly sacred fables in the Bible describe God as creating evil intentionally, of consorting with evil, being compelled by evil, and of gambling with the devil -with human suffering as the desired outcome. In fact, God is depicted as being almost entirely evil himself, throughout the entire cluster of repugnant horror stories.
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Creationists insist that mutations are very rare and are usually, if not always harmful. But the fact is that the vast majority of mutations are completely neutral. They'd have to be because, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, there is an overall average of 128 mutations per human zygote! So apparently, in creationist terms, very rare means more than a hundred per person right from the point of conception. Because those are just the mutations we start out with. Our cells will mutate again 30 more times over the course of our lives, and some of these subsequent mutations can be passed on to our children too –usually with no more effect than those we recognize as family traits.
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Asking for the meaning of life is no different than a fortune teller casting tea leaves, chicken bones, or Tarot cards, then looking at the random mess they created and wondering what that means. Abrahamic religion offers no purpose either, apart from a Stockholm syndrome, because the best you can hope for is to be imprisoned by an indomitable despot and have to press your lips to his colon for the rest of eternity –or else suffer a fate worse than death. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
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Do you think it inconsistent for someone who lacks belief in the stork to object when public schools teach middle schoolers that that's where babies come from? Likewise no history class should ever confuse students by playing any movie with Mel Gibson's name in the credits, because they're wrong, and it's wrong to mislead students. It would be inconsistent for one who loves and seeks knowledge of truth not to object to lies or challenge liars. Everything religion teaches is wrong. Although public schools are not teaching about the stork, some of them are teaching creationism, which is just as demonstrably absurdly wrong; In either case, it's a criminal immoral disservice, and should be corrected.
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Many creationists say that it is impossible to understand or believe the Bible unless it is read in the spirit of the holy ghost. In other words, you must already assume its truth before you read it, and you have to read it through filters of faith because it certainly isn't compelling on its own without those blinders on. If it doesn't make sense, then you've got to convince yourself that you must not understand it properly, and you've just got to try to make yourself believe it anyway somehow. That is precisely why creationist faith is deemed 'dogmatic'. But that's also proof by admission that even a literal reading must be interpreted. So its very design is such that the Bible can not be either inerrant or absolute truth.
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Creationists habitually misdefine their terms, and commonly insist that evolution means life from non-life. But of course that's not right either. Evolution explains how life diversifies, not how it began. Since evolution at every level is -by definition- limited to the variation of allele frequencies inherited over generations of living organisms, then it obviously can't operate where no genomes yet exist. The evolutionary process starts with genetics and can't start before it.
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The evidence of evolution, and even the event of evolution itself, –the proof of it- are both directly observed, and testable, and demonstrably factual. But religious beliefs are none of the above and never have been; they're assumed on faith. Whether or not these beliefs turn out to be correct, they are asserted as true without justification in the form of evidence.
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Creationists often cite the laws of Thermodynamics as if they could somehow apply to the diversification of life on earth. They don't. Lord Kelvin, the scientist who discovered those laws was a creationist himself. He was definitely opposed to evolution. But even he said that thermodynamics demands that the earth would still have to be on the order of twenty to forty million years old at least, even if the bowels of the world didn't continue to heat themselves radioactively, which of course they do, and that pushes the age back much further.
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It seems that religion only knows how to react violently, out of vengeance. Again this is because it's a belief system rooted in dichotomy and bigotry, with little or no desire to consider extenuating circumstances and NO ability to question itself objectively.
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Despite the severity of their punishments, religions have still consistently failed in virtually all attempts to curtail criminal behavior, and have in fact actually empowered or promoted criminality in many ways. More reasonable laws are usually more effective.
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It is important to note that humans are a subset of apes, being members of the taxonomic superfamily Hominoidea. This is no arbitrary classification, but one that is objectively verifiable through phylogenetics. This is a fact that can be proven regardless what you would rather believe. Yet no religion either accounts for this fact nor even acknowledges it, as it stands against all their collective mythology.
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Once upon a time, the founder of Protestant Christianity, said that doctors were fools, for treating diseases, as if they came from material causes. Then, Louis Pasteur disproved that, and came up with something, gonna love this, he called it "Germ Theory." Germs are still a theory! Atomic Theory is still a theory. Theory of gravity has never been proved.
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It is also important to remember that evolution works like any other aspect of real life, in that not everything progresses or progresses at the same speed. It's just like at work: some employees may suddenly excel, soaring through the corporate ranks while others may be in the same position doing the same old thing as long as they're there. Some even get demoted. Not everything moves in the same pace or in the same direction, and some don't seem to change much at all.
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From the creationist's perspective, the method or mechanism of creation which these mystical beings use is nothing more than a golem spell where clay statues are animated with an enchantment. Or its an incantation in which complex modern plants and animals are "spoken" into being. That's right, magic words which cause fully-developed adult animals to be conjured out of thin air. Or a god simply wishes them to exist; so they do. That's it! There really is nothing more to it than that; pure freakin' magic –by definition. Remember that the next time you hear anything from a creation scientist.
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If you say you believe in God, but you don't really believe in God, then how you could you possibly be trying to fool God? Wouldn't you have to believe there is a god if you're going to try and deceive him? And what is the deception? Are you trying to trick God into thinking you believe in him? If you don't believe in God then that's not even possible. So already the Qur'an reveals sufficient absurdity to prove that it cannot have been authored by any god. Seriously, could this be any less ridiculous if it were written in Arabic?
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Having actually read all of the Commandments listed from Exodus 20 through Exodus 34 (and many of the other Commandments strewn about the Old Testament), it is obvious that anyone who uses them as a moral guide would be a criminal in every country on this planet. The Bible does not promote morality; it only commands obedience to an amoral, oppressive and unjustly enforced belief system.
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The idea that certain races (or species) are 'higher' or 'lower' was not Darwin's idea but the universal language of all prior naturalists since forever. Darwin acknowledges this, but does not contribute to it, other than to suggest that Caucasians are not the ultimate form of mankind.
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There are eleven Commandments just in Exodus 20, and that list continues into the next three chapters, with many being ethnospecific and limited to the regional currency of sheep and shekels. It wasn't even relevant then and it has no parallel in the American legal system now, especially since we've freed the slaves, allowed women their own agency, and defied the Commandments by rejecting theocracy, permitting freedom of religion and prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, creed or national heritage.
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While I don't like to encourage nationalism, I must admit that I feel... patriotic with regard to the ideals that the Founding Fathers had and on which this country was founded. I just wish that my fellow Americans knew more of our own history and of earlier European history to know what those ideals actually were.
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We can tell murder is wrong because we have objective criteria by which we can determine for certain whether murder is wrong, and we can do that regardless of what mood the gods are in nowadays. There has to be an objectively verifiable reason why something is moral or immoral, or else no one could know whether it is, including God, since the Bible has Him changing His mind all the time. Without that criteria, you couldn't know what is moral or immoral either; you just have to trust whatever the people said who pretended to speak for God.
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If you can't show that it's true, then you can't call it truth. Knowledge is similar to truth in that it a justified belief. Knowledge is demonstrable and testable with measurable accuracy. If you can't demonstrate your knowledge to any degree at all by any means whatsoever then you don't actually know what you think you do, no matter how convinced of it you are. Without evidentiary support, then it is only an empty assertion unworthy of serious consideration.
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[According to the Qur'an] God will punish me for not believing even though it is his fault that I don't believe. God doesn't need to seal my heart and my ears or cover my eyes. How about providing something that I could see or hear that would actually indicate a god? Why does God demand faith in lieu of evidence? I think it's not just that there is no evidence, but that the reason there isn't is because there is no god either.
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Quote of the day
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work—that goes on, it adds up.
Barbara Kingsolver
Aron Ra
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Born:
October 15, 1962
(age 62)
Bio:
L. Aron Nelson, known professionally as Aron Ra, is the Texas state director of the American Atheists, host of the Ra-Men Podcast, a public speaker, video producer, blogger, and vlogger.
Most used words:
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religion
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evolution
reason
commandments
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creationists
life
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bible
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